Seems Nigeria Evolved a Parallel English Language

By

Chidera Michaels, Ph.D.

chideramichaels@gmail.com

Nigerians’ ingenuity at fusing the various Nigerians tongues and the English Language into what their erstwhile British overlords derogatorily termed “Broken English” was an amazing feat that afforded the natives a chance to make heads and tails out of what must have sounded to them as “Greek.” In those early days of colonialism when over 80% of Nigerians could neither read nor write in English, the educated few (most of whom were only marginally educated) had to come up with ways of enabling the vast majority of Nigerians to acquire a passing understanding of the English Language. And by the way, “Broken English” is still a delight to listen to. However, today, “Broken English” has come to be understood by virtually everyone in Nigeria so that “Broken” (as it is usually shortened to) could truly be regarded as the nation’s real lingua franca – since more Nigerians understand and communicate in it than understand and communicate in regular English Language. This may not be a bad thing as nothing unifies a nation more than a common language.

But given the extreme mobility of Nigerians, “Broken” is rather restrictive of Nigerians’ ability to communicate with the outside world. The simple reason is that not many people understand “Broken” outside the West African sub-region.

But whether the widespread use of “Broken” is responsible for the steady decline of Nigerians’ ability to master and use the English Language is beyond the scope of this piece. “Broken,” however, as an amalgam of English Language and the various Nigerian native tongues is not English Language. That much is clear. But what has happened to how Nigerians write and speak regular English Language is a question that Nigerian authorities have to find the answer to, and pretty quickly too, given the nature of today’s world. The distressing apposite reality is that Nigerians have steadily and gradually evolved a parallel English Language with the inevitable consequence that they sometimes say things that are sharply opposite of what they mean to communicate and write words that strangely distort what they want to convey?            

A relative of mine who arrived the United States a couple of years ago and who was staying with us had a few of his college buddies over one evening. As they passed the open door of my study where a work colleague of mine and I sat talking shop, I overheard my relative tell the other boys that “my uncle’s friend is reading law.” Later that evening, my wife who is always seeking for ways to entertain people asked everybody to stay for dinner. Then over dinner, my relative had reason again to mention that my friend was “reading law.” I saw the blank looks the Americans in our midst gave one another. I understood their difficulty – they had no idea what my relative was talking about. My relative’s friends could see that my friend wasn’t reading any law books – he was eating dinner. What my relative meant to tell his friends, though, was that my friend was studying law, or that my friend was in law school.   

The revealing thing about this statement by my relative was that he was supposed to be a rare product of Nigeria’s dysfunctional and near-collapsed educational system. He had passed with a score of “A” in English Language (among other A’s) on his WAEC examinations. My relative had been sent to the United States by his affluent parents to attend college here. But when he went to take his placement test (which usually comprised of secondary school Math and English) at the junior college (two-year university), he failed the test – two times. Those initial failures took me by surprise given the strength of his academic achievements from Nigeria. But I did not attach too much importance to those initial failures because, as I figured it, his problem could stem from the culture shock of his new environment or from Americans’ English accent.

We then enrolled him in the GED (equivalent to GEC) classes. He was able to pass the GED after a year of study. But then at the end of his first semester of college, I was truly shocked when he failed his “English 69” course (a remedial class that is not college level English) he was placed in because his placement test score was not good enough to place him in English 101. That was when it really dawned on me what was happening: my relative wrote English Language the way he spoke it. You see, he would ask my little son to “off the light” when what he meant was for the boy to turn off the light. In one of the essays he had turned in at the college he wrote that “[T]he rich industrialist enjoined the cooperation of the people in his efforts to develop the town …” What he had effectively said in his essay was that the industrialist asked the people not to cooperate with him. That, of course, was not what my relative meant to say. He had no idea what the word “enjoin” means. No, strike that; he thought enjoin meant the opposite of what the word means. When I sought to know why he would make such a mistake when there is a dictionary in the house, he convinced me that he had used the word in the sense it is used in Nigeria by showing me articles in web-based Nigerian newspapers that used the word in the sense he had used it. There are about a dozen other English words he uses as those words’ antonyms, and others he uses in ways that is not easy to describe. We will also learn later from my relative that in Nigeria people say that one “read” law (language of the elite really); not that one studied law – a style of word usage understood more readily only in Nigeria.

At this point I was looking at two irreducible possibilities as sources of my relative’s problems: either he was a fraud who most certainly paid someone else to take his WAEC examinations for him or he was truly smart but was taught a parallel “English Language;” a language that has its own word meanings and rules of grammar distinct from those of regular English Language, a language that has somehow evolved in Nigeria. But whichever of those possibilities was my relative’s problem, I was sure of one thing: my relative has a colossal problem on his hands that could frustrate his chances of obtaining quality education in this country. And so I decided to dig a little deep to find out what the genesis of his problems may be by calling up a few people in Nigeria. What I found out left a repulsively sickening feeling in my stomach.

I found out that corruption, a familiar Nigerian drumbeat which has eaten deep into every facet of her life, has dealt a devastating blow to her educational system as well. Public education in Nigeria is now a ghost of its former self. And its private counterpart (at every level), born out of the need to take the place of the collapsed public schools, is now perhaps Nigeria’s newest and fastest-growing unregulated fraudulent machine. Nature, they say, does not allow vacuum, right? Well, that includes even when the replacement is really no different from the one it replaced. The only difference that matters to these parents, as I understand it, is that private school teachers come to school. Their public school counterparts, on the other hand, are perpetually on strike agitating for one entitlement or another.

Anybody who can rent a space anywhere (no matter how squalid) and who have enough money to hire a few high school graduates have himself or herself an elementary or secondary school; and parents will flood these places with their children. Anything, it seems, is better than the public schools. My relative was the product of one of such private high schools. And while almost everybody from his graduating class failed to garner two to three credits from their WAEC examinations, my relative was the only one who aced five subjects and passed the rest with “C’s” in his school. Amazing, isn’t it? Well, my relative is sticking to his story that he achieved that miracle by dint of his hard work. It turned out his parents were even more surprised and skeptical than I am. But since we have unearthed nothing to contradict my relative’s insistence that he achieved what his high school diploma says, we believe him.       

I discovered, while trying to diagnose the source of my relative’s quasi-miraculous educational achievements while in Nigeria, a phenomenon that had rotted and wrung the life out Nigeria’s educational system: a pervasive examination malpractice culture that has robbed Nigerian students of the need for hard work in their studies during their college (or any other kind of school) educational careers. The result of which is that nearly none of the products of Nigerian educational institutions is educated – they have certificates that say they are educated but they are not. But these people are the future of Nigeria; a frightening prospect for the destiny of any nation.

And because, at the core, Nigeria’s educational institutions had not educated their students, this means that their products cannot compete with other students from outside her borders. This inability to compete had led to the evolution of a make-belief system of education where these products are the only people who understand each other. Thus, Nigeria evolved a parallel English Language where their brand of English Language is largely understood only by Nigerians. And by so doing, Nigeria has written herself off from being able to meaningfully engage in intercourse with other nations in global commerce in today’s fast dwindling global village. Because Nigeria has allowed this toil-averse educational system to fester inside her, Nigeria has ensured that the only thing the products of her educational system can do outside her borders is the exportation of the corruption the system had steeped in them. 

Back to my relative for a second: I think he will be okay for a couple of reasons: he is fortunate to have the means to escape Nigeria’s corrupt educational system, and he is still young enough to withstand the rigors of ridding his mind of Nigerian-style toil-averse sense of entitlement to “education” that Nigerians have been led to believe comes without the usual vicissitudes that accompany the acquisition of education. But the question should be: what about the millions of Nigerians who cannot jet out to the United States or to some other country where they have good educational system to obtain their own education? And what will happen to Nigeria as a corporate entity seeing that things may only get worse in the educational sector – since no one at the helms of affairs seems to be doing anything other than speaking from the corners of their mouths while they, at the same time, make arrangements to ship their own children out to Western countries to acquire quality education?

And what happens to workers’ productivity if Nigeria’s educational institutions continue to churn out illiterates with college degrees? I know a lot of people have been singing Nigeria’s Nunc Dimitis for a while now, but nothing will kill a nation faster than an illiterate workforce in the twenty-first century. And democracy, too, needs an educated populace to thrive. This may be news flash to a lot of Nigerians, but politicians do not hand out bags of rice (and the like) in other older democracies of the world. If you doubt that democracy needs educated populace, you may still remember how some people in Nigeria began to riot and set properties on fire in the North after the last general election while screaming that their candidate won the election and was not declared the winner. Their chosen candidate, it turned out, had swept the polls in their localities. A governor from the northern part of Nigeria had to summon the courage to inform these folks that their villages were not the entire Nigeria. That’s what illiteracy could do to democracy. Tribal bigots masquerading as politicians use such ill-informed folks to foment trouble, especially since no one ever seems to want to conceit elections in Nigeria.